Moonshot AI Targets European Compute
Moonshot AI, the Chinese lab behind the Kimi model, is reportedly exploring options in Europe to secure access to the latest Nvidia Blackwell AI GPUs. According to reports, the company is in negotiations with at least one European data center operator to lease clusters consisting of 8,000 or more GPUs for inferencing tasks, while also expressing interest in obtaining compute capacity for model training.
While Chinese firms face strict bans on acquiring Nvidia Blackwell and other high-performance AI GPUs containing U.S. technology, a regulatory loophole has permitted access to such hardware via remote rental from international data centers. Legislative efforts, such as the Remote Access Security Act, are currently moving through the U.S. government to address this gap, though the bill has not yet been enacted into law.
Hardware Restrictions and Market Dynamics
The ongoing AI competition between the U.S. and China persists despite Washington's export controls aimed at limiting Chinese access to advanced American hardware. While the U.S. previously allowed the export of Nvidia H200 chips to China, Beijing has implemented its own restrictions on these imports to foster its domestic semiconductor industry. Consequently, Chinese labs are increasingly looking to foreign infrastructure to access the high-end compute resources necessary for training advanced models.
Moonshot faces a narrowing window for securing external compute capacity, as Nvidia has reportedly instructed its data center clients to limit their business and avoid serving more than 49% of their total capacity to Chinese entities. These developments may accelerate the push for bipartisan legislative action to tighten remote access to high-performance computing resources.
